A brutal murder. There are scratches on Cèsar Hawke’s arms, a discharged Glock on his coffee table, and a dead woman in his bathtub. Yeah, maybe he brought the waitress home for some fun—he was too drunk to remember it—but he knows for a fact that he didn’t kill her. He’s an agent with the Office of Preternatural Affairs. He doesn’t hurt people. He saves them. The cops disagree. Now Cèsar is running. The search for a shaman. Isobel Stonecrow speaks with the dead…for the right price. She brings closure to the bereaved and heals broken hearts. But when she resurrects someone for the wrong client, she ends up on the OPA’s most wanted list. One risky solution. Tracking down Isobel is the last case assigned to Cèsar before he bolts. If he finds her, he can prove that he didn’t kill that waitress. He can clear his name, get his job back, and bring justice to the victim. She’s just one witch. Cèsar has bagged a dozen witches before. How hard can one more be?

USA TODAY Best-Selling Author SM Reine presents a new series for fans of The Dresden Files and The Iron Druid Chronicles... Former private investigator Cèsar Hawke has one rule: He doesn't deal with dead bodies. That's why he enlisted with the Magical Violations Department in the Office of Preternatural Affairs. He's happy tracking down witches that commit petty crimes, but he leaves the homicides to other agents. Except that he's been assigned to a new team—a team that handles special investigations—and the job has suddenly changed. Now Cèsar has to deal with dead bodies. He also has to deal with necromancers, murderous cults, and demons that can stop a man's heart with fear. This isn't the job he signed up for, but it's the job he needs to do. If he survives the first week.

A killer is mutilating bodies in Los Angeles. Agent Cèsar Hawke is on the case, but the murderer is ahead of him—way ahead of him. Wiping the memories of the dead so that the team's necrocognitive can't talk to them? Done. Preventing magical reconstruction of the crime scenes? Oh yeah. And the murders keep getting more brutal while Cèsar struggles to catch up. The best way to heat up a cold case is to go to Helltown, where Los Angeles' most powerful evil hides out, but even those demons are afraid of the murderer. Their fear adds one more question to the growing pile of unknowns: What kind of bad guy is too hot for Helltown?

When more than a dozen people die at a retirement home, the official story is carbon monoxide poisoning. Cèsar Hawke is convinced the reason is less mundane and more infernal. But that’s his job. As an agent working for the Office of Preternatural Affairs, he’s always looking for supernatural answers to deadly questions. Isobel Stonecrow agrees to help him find the truth. With her powers of necrocognition, she can speak to the dead and get the real story. But when they return to the crime scene, they find a lot more than cadavers. They find a nightmare that they can’t escape—a nightmare from Isobel’s past, which even she can’t completely remember thanks to the contract that signed away her soul. Cèsar will have to disinter Isobel’s secrets to save her. He’ll learn who Isobel used to be, what she’s done, and the price she paid…no matter how deadly the knowledge might be.

Isobel Stonecrow’s life has an expiration date: One month, two weeks, four days, and six hours remaining. Not that she’s counting. When she signed a contract giving her soul and memories to a demon named Ander, she didn’t expect that she would ever have to face termination. But now Ander is dead and she’ll be following suit if she can’t find a way to dissolve the deal. Too bad she can’t remember anything from the time before she signed the contract. Fritz Friederling, a billionaire demon hunter who owns several businesses in Hell, isn’t ready to give up on Isobel. But she isn’t sure that working with Fritz is better than dying. She doesn’t know much about her past life, but she knows that she signed Ander’s contract for a reason—and that getting away from Fritz was a significant part of it. Escaping her contract means remembering the life that she chose to forget. And it means trusting Fritz Friederling, who Isobel fears might be the biggest danger of all…

Agent Cèsar Hawke is in his element when he’s investigating magical crime. And with his boss out of town, Cèsar gets to pick which cases he works on. He’s bent on doing nothing involving demons, zombies, or fallen angels this time. Instead, he’s going to find the witch who used magic to rob a bank. Easy stuff. Cèsar plans to catch the perp before his boss gets home. But when he digs into the robbery, he finds much more than missing money. He also finds a deadly turf battle between two covens and a trail of bloody violence. A trail that leads directly to his brother, Domingo Hawke. Domingo wants Cèsar’s help taking down his enemies. Forget that Cèsar works for the Office of Preternatural Affairs, forget allegiances, forget pesky “contracts” and “conduct.” Domingo is calling in a favor and the Hawke family is too tight to refuse. Blood is the most powerful ingredient in any witch’s spell, after all…

The worst case scenario has happened: Reno NV has fallen to demons. Someone at the Office of Preternatural Affairs fucked up. As the lead of a secret internal investigations team, Agent Cesar Hawke needs to discover who is responsible. And then he needs to kill them.

Cèsar Hawke works for the Office of Preternatural Affairs, and until now, his detective work has been a secret to the nation. But a Senator has been publicly assassinated in Washington DC…by a demon. Now America knows that the preternatural are real. Everyone knows it's real. The doomsday clock is ticking. A change is coming. And if Cèsar doesn't stop the Apple cult from sating their bitter thirst for power, then all Americans will end up fodder to feed hungry angels.

My name's Cèsar Hawke, and the people in my life are filled with good intentions. We all know where that ends up. A fissure to Hell has ripped from Las Vegas to Los Angeles and now half the City of Dis is in my hometown. Helltown's hotter than ever. Demon dynasties are on the rise. Nightmares are out to get me. Staying alive means forgiving people I've kicked out of my life, it means getting vicious with magic, and yeah, it means I'm dealing with dead bodies. Lots of them. I'm Cèsar Hawke. I used to be an agent with the Office of Preternatural Affairs. And this is how the world ends.

Cesar Hawke works for the Office of Preternatural Affairs. He's an agent in the Magic Violations Department, hunting down witches who break the law, saving lives, and getting caught up in a lot more trouble than he's paid to deal with. Fritz Friederling is his boss. The director. The heir of the Friederling fortune, earned by mining in Hell with human slaves. A man who puts away witches for life without trial. Inheritor of his father's legacy, and his grandfather's, and all the ruthless men who came before. But they didn't always work together. Not before, and not after. Once they were strangers, and now they're something else. More fatal than family, more permanent than marriage, closer than the oldest friends, until death do they part... This novella tells the story of the early years of their partnership from Fritz Friederling's perspective. It contains spoilers and should be read after the rest of the Preternatural Affairs series. It also includes a new, exclusive afterword from the author!